The Book of Secrets

LX

Mainz, 1448

Two old men stood on a hillside. A passing observer might have taken them for brothers. They were a similar age, near fifty, both with grey beards and lean bodies wrapped in furs against the autumn chill. Their features differed in detail, but beneath the aged skin and crooked bones both faces bore the hunger of men who still had business with the world.

They were not brothers. One was Johann Fust. The other was me. All around us, labourers turned the soil in the sloping field. They pulled up rocks and deposited them in piles to be fitted into walls. In the middle of the field, a group of carpenters raised timbers for a watchtower. When spring came, the derelict land would be planted with vines and blossom into a vineyard. In the same way, I hoped Fust’s seeds would make my own venture flourish.

I had not spoken to him in fifteen years, not since our chance encounter in Olivier’s workshop in Paris. In some ways it was surprising we had not spoken sooner. I had been there a year, and Mainz was not so big that two men engaged in the work of books and papers should not cross paths. But I had avoided him. Until now.

I cannot count the disappointments of those intervening years. Kaspar once told me that the mystery of pressing copies of the playing cards was not one great secret but a dozen – the ink, the metal, the press, the paper – each element in its correct form and proportion. In that I suppose it resembled alchemy, though he produced more than my efforts in Paris ever had. But if his art was a dozen secrets, each to be unravelled and understood, mine comprehended a hundred, or a thousand. Every one of them eluded me. And, as Dunne once told me, every time I solved one problem I created ten new ones.

Yet unlike earlier setbacks, they did not make me despair. I was an overenthusiastic pilgrim who had embarked without knowing his route. Thinking the journey would be short, I had blundered blind in the thickets of the forest. Now I had found my road, though my destination proved to be further than I could have imagined when I set out. And that gave me confidence which stones and blisters could not break.

But though faith sustains a pilgrim, he makes his way in the world of men. I still needed money. And that was why I had come home to Mainz. I had left the city of roads and returned to the city of my birth, like an old bear returning to its cave. When I set out, almost thirty years previous, I had left behind a home, a mother, two siblings and a half-sister who had stolen my inheritance. Now all were gone except the old house, which had finally passed to me.

Fust’s vineyard stood on the hill that rose out of the river valley behind the city. Below, I could see all the walls and spires of Mainz, dominated by the great red dome of the cathedral, stretching forward to the banks of the Rhine. A brown haze smudged the air above it, smoke of countless fires. The autumn sun had reached its zenith, but no bells tolled noon. Every church stood silent. The effect was eerie, as indeed it was meant to be.

‘You chose a strange time to return after so long,’ Fust said. ‘Golden Mainz has lost its lustre.’

I knew. For decades, the patricians who ran the city council – men like my father – had operated an elaborate system of annuities which diverted the tax revenues into their own pockets. The interest they paid themselves had spiralled, much like my own debts, until at last the city was forced to declare bankruptcy. Among its angry creditors was the Church, which promptly suspended all services in the city. Masses went unsung, babies were not baptised and the dead suffered without Christian burial.

‘There must be some wealth still in Mainz.’ Beyond the distant walls, craft of all sizes clustered at the riverbank, while cranes and stevedores loaded bales onto barges. Three milling boats swung at their moorings, grinding the last of the harvest.

‘This vineyard, for example. It will take years of careful nurturing to bear fruit. You would not be reclaiming it if you thought the city’s prospects were tarnished for ever.’

‘There will always be a demand for wine. The worse things get, the greater it will be.’

Fust looked at the rough earth around him a moment longer, then switched to me. Why have you come here? his sharp eyes said. But he would make me go first.

‘Wine is not all that can flow out of a press,’ I said.

He waited. From the bag I was carrying, I handed him a sheet of paper.

‘I have discovered an art. A new form of writing without a pen.’

He unfolded the paper and studied it. ‘Indulgences?’

‘That is just the beginning.’ I reached in my bag again and pulled out a small booklet, four leaves folded inside each other to give sixteen pages.

‘The Latin primer of Aelius Donatus. Every student in every school needs one.’

He gave me an impatient look: he knew what it was. ‘I must have sold three hundred of these. They sell as fast as the scribes can copy them.’

‘I can copy them faster and more cheaply than any scribe. In a month, I could produce all the copies you have ever sold – and more.’

Fust watched the work of the vineyard around him and said nothing. He had bargained his way from Paris to Vienna and back; he knew how to control his emotions. But he could not hide all his surprise.

He glanced down and read through the first few lines of the book.

‘No corrections,’ he commented. It was true. Unlike other manuscripts there were no crossings-out, no scrawls in the margin.

‘With this new form of writing, we can proofread and correct before we put a word on the page.’

That cracked his composure, drawing a sharp look to see if he was being made a fool of.

‘Customers like to see corrections,’ was all he said.

‘They are scabs on the page. They disfigure it.’

‘They prove that the author has taken care to examine his work.’

‘But if he has taken the ultimate care there will be no mistake to correct.’

‘Only God is perfect.’

‘Then I will be as nearly perfect as possible.’

Fust examined the page again. ‘You still have work to do. There is more to writing than spelling. However these pages were written, it was not with a steady hand.’

‘That is why I need capital. To perfect the invention. I thought that with your interests in bookselling, you might be interested.’ I put out my hand to take back the grammar book. ‘Perhaps I was wrong.’

Fust held on to the book.

‘A new form of writing that can be read before it is written and produce more copies in a month than a scribe in his lifetime,’ I repeated. ‘How much would that be worth to you?’

Fust gave a thin smile. ‘I think you are about to tell me.’

I had had enough of scrabbling for piecemeal loans that barely paid the interest on the last. Nor did I want a syndicate of investors whose squabbles devoured my time more than the work itself. I had determined to settle in Mainz. That meant a single creditor, so indebted to the project that he could not let it fail.

‘A thousand gulden.’

Fust lifted his hands and blew on them.

‘That is a fabulous sum. How will you spend it in such a way that you can repay me?’

‘Come and see.’